1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of use of presenting multimedia information using a computer network. More particularly, the present invention relates to presenting distributed multimedia information.
2. Description of Related Art
Currently, content providers who wish to provide multimedia data such as video and audio data to users over a network such as the Internet must be cognizant of the size of the multimedia data to be transferred as most users will not be willing to endure the length of time required to transfer large files. In addition, transferring large files poses other problems in cases where users do not have a stable network connection. This leads to interrupted information transfer, which in turn results in wasted bandwidth and time to perform re-transfers.
For example, assuming no control information overhead and perfect line conditions, a file that is one megabyte (MB) in size will take approximately 5 minutes to transfer using a modem having a transfer speed of 28,800 bits of second. However, under normal conditions, accounting for overhead data and imperfect line conditions, the transfer often takes much longer. With multimedia data files becoming larger in order to contain the length of materials desired, including book audio and video data, the time required for transferring these files are also becoming larger.
Although advances in communications networks have been made to increase the transfer speed of these files, the rate at which files are growing is still outpacing the rate at which transfer speeds are increasing. Consequently, content providers must design "web-sites," which are comprised of files containing hyper-text markup language (HTML), digital audio and video information, so as not require a significant amount of time or network resources to load. Unfortunately, this means that content providers have to use lower quality versions of multimedia files, which has been subjected to some data compression schemes, to present their messages.
The network constraints described above are not acceptable for applications where large multimedia files must be transferred. For example, in a web-site containing various advertisements for cruise ship utilizing audio/video information in addition to text, a content provider might desire to play a sample video for each cruise package in which a user expresses an interest. However, with the current level of network technology that is available to a majority of users, this desire is not achievable.
A proposed solution is to pre-distribute the multimedia data using removable media to an interested user which will allow the user to have any necessary information locally and thus by-pass a download of large multimedia data files. The user can then view video or listen to audio in conjunction with using a browser application to access a content provider's web-site without having to wait for the multimedia to be transferred over the network. However, a solution is necessary to provide integration of the display of the local multimedia information with the information that is displayed in the browser application.